A Musical Key to Earth’s Wild Music

Here are five animals, each with the music it makes or inspires, and each with a bit of its story, selected from Earth’s Wild Music.

My new book, Earth’s Wild Music, is a celebration of sounds made by the planet’s singing, wheezing, croaking, whistling animals, and a call to defend them against the forces of extinction. But it does not escape my attention that writing a book about sounds is sort of like singing a song about the taste of beef stew, or smelling a logical fallacy. Something gets lost in the translation. I can wring my thesaurus dry, trying to describe a sound in words, but nothing quite compares to hearing it. This is why I am delighted to present sound samples of some of the music-makers who sing in my book. Here are five animals, each with the music it makes or inspires, and each with a bit of its story, selected from Earth’s Wild Music.

1. Lambeosaurus

“Even if dinosaurs couldn’t make music with their throats, like birds, they could still shake the heck out of the air. Some dinosaurs blew air into their closed mouths and through nasal cavities into resonance chambers, which we see in fossils as bony crests. They made the forest echo with clear, ominous tones, eerily like a cello. How do I know this? I have heard it, in recordings scientists made of the sound they produced when they blew air through crests constructed to mimic lambeosaurus’s.”

“Some dinosaurs hissed through closed teeth. The air rang with not only the heavy thud or quick scramble of clawed feet but also grunts and groans, chirps and rattles, or other closed-mouth vocalizations . . . The diplodocus whipped its tail at supersonic speeds, cracking the air. I was just getting used to all this when I learned that some dinosaurs cooed to their mates. Like doves.”

“And now, get this. Turns out that even if some dinosaurs didn’t sing, they danced.”

(p. 25)

2. Humpback whale (Glacier Bay, Alaska)

“Forty years later, we bought a cabin on the edge of a cove in Southeast Alaska. After a long dusk that first day, the sun finally dropped below the mountains, leaving a pink glaze on the water. We slept to the wash of waves in the rock wrack. But not for long. A sudden call jolted us awake, a long, drawn-out squeal. Did you hear that? What in god’s name? A wolf howling? It might have been, but there were no wolves on the island and the sound was chestier than wolves. An elephant trumpeting? That’s what it sounded like, but no mastodons had stomped these beaches for ten thousand years. Nothing we have ever heard matched the magnitude of that bleating. A ruckus of chunks and splashings sounded from the inlet, and then the night returned to its gentle swash. In the morning, we saw a distant pod of humpbacks, spouting clouds of sunlight.”

“Those, we learned, were the feeding calls of the humpback whale.”

(p. 91-92)

Sound courtesy of  Hank Lentfer

3. Red-breasted sapsucker drumming (Gustavus, Alaska)

“Do you know why the sapsucker taps that rhythm? my husband asked me. Brumdiddydiddydiddy. Deet. Deet. He paused for a long time and then did it again. Brumdiddydiddydiddy. Deet. Deet. Four o’clock in the morning in our Alaskan cabin, and my dear husband is lying in bed with his eyes closed, doing an adequate imitation of a woodpecker.”

“I don’t know. I give up. I knew the answer was going to be wilder than I was capable of imagining. ”

“So the pounding creates heat energy. Right? Like nails get hot when they are pounded. It’s a bad fever when your brain heats up. So the sapsucker evolved to count time between riffs to let his brain cool down.”

“Frank plummeted back to sleep, but I lay sort of dazed and dozing, dreaming of Father Time and Mother Nature biting and kissing as they rolled down the beach—the fierce battle between the forces of destruction and the forces of creation. Father Time had a tangled beard and dirty white robe, but somehow he had lost his shepherd’s crook, and Mother Nature wore nothing at all, a hefty, ripe old woman.”

“Oh, they love each other and they hate each other and they need each other. Father Time, the agent of crumble and disruption, endless depletion, mass dying, selective dying, a force hungry enough to eat mountains. Mother Nature? — inevitable creation and imaginative flowering, endless giving. Through millions of years of no-holds-barred evolution, they wrestle and scold and make wild love. Together, they create new life forms, ongoing. And somehow, they figured out the red-breasted sapsucker. Who would have thought?”

(p. 48-49)

Sound courtesy of Hank Lentfer

4. Grizzly bear hunting on the beach (Glacier Bay, Alaska)

“To this day, I do not know why we accepted the guide’s invitation to cross the river in canoes and hike up to fish a lake behind the first hill. I’m sure now that the bear was watching us from the moment we ground onto the beach, but we didn’t see him until we were a quarter mile toward the lake. He was standing in the scrubby trees, looking hard at us. The direct gaze of a bear is not a good thing. The four of us grouped up and began to back away. The bear disappeared into the willows, and then reappeared even closer. He stepped forward, raised up on his hind legs, dropped to all fours, galloped a few more paces toward us, and stopped. We drew every defensive armament we had—air horns, flares, bear spray—and stood there in a row like desperadoes ready for a gun fight. It’s a wonder the bear didn’t fall down laughing. He did not. He stepped closer. We stepped back. He stepped closer. We stepped back. Our fingers twitched over the various triggers, and all the nozzles pointed straight at the bear. He stepped closer.”

(p. 230)

Sound courtesy of Hank Lentfer

5. Albatross

“Listen: The albatross is whispering to her egg on the nest. Her long beak, tracked with the white trails of the salty tears she has shed, reaches down to touch the shell that holds her child. Small sounds—whistle-tick, mumble—surely the blind, curled chick hears his mother. Does she promise? asks a woman. I will nudge you into the sweet feathers of my chest and sing to you a whistling song. Until you fly from me forever, I will keep you safe and defend you steadfastly.”

(p. 71)

Here is the music that concert pianist Rachelle McCabe chose to evoke the music of an albatross sailing over the spindrift waves on six-foot wings. It is Sibelius, Impromptu #5.